IP Phone Problems

APR

Apr 23, 2008 by Shad Vick

IP Phone Problems Do you have IP phones yet? Hold tight before you buy. There are a few things you should know.

About a year ago we purchased some AVAYA IP phones. We had been stretching our cell phones as "legitimate" work extensions as long as we possibly could before having to invest in a "phone system". When we hit the point of hiring a receptionist to help with all the calls, we bit the bullet and paid the money for 4 Internet based IP phones.

At first everything worked great. At last we could transfer calls to each other, easily put a client on hold, engage in conference calls at the touch of a button, and even help each other by picking up someone else's call (yes from another room) when they are out of the office.

Then all the sudden I'm on a call one day and it drops off the earth. I figure the potential client must have had cell phone difficulty, but I find out our provider was "restarting" the phones. Kinda like routers how they need the recycle weekly deal at times.

At times the person on the other end of the line sounds like they're under water. I've been told as well that the person I'm talking to hears weird noises. This is rare, but still - regular phones didn't do this stuff.

Needless to say, we've had several drawbacks since switching over, but generally speaking the conveniences "slightly, barely" outweigh the problems at this very moment so we'll hang on a little longer.

Comments

utahseo

04/25/2008 11:03am

We've been with Jive Communications for about a year now and have had very few problems. In 12 months we've probably had 4-5 dropped calls and perhaps 2-3 experiences with bad audio, all of which is well within the range of acceptability for us, especially given that we're paying $130/month for what previously cost us $400 per month, plus some features we never had before, like getting voicemails forwarded as audio files to our email accounts, being able to plug the phone into any network jack, anywhere, and have it instantly work, etc.